Friday, 5 June 2015

Making Life in the Lab in the 1800s: Andrew Crosse - The Man Who Created Life

Making Life in the Lab in the 1800s

Andrew Crosse: The Man Who Created
Life

by Alexander Randis

Did a little known amateur scientist by the name of Andrew Crosse
discover how to create life? Did he unintentionally
discover a mixture of electricity and chemicals which yielded living creatures
from a lifeless compound? If he did not, then what did he achieve? As the
written account of his handiwork is vivid, only the baffling and inexplicable
results annoy science.

Andrew Crosse was born on June 17, 1784, into a wealthy family at Fyne
Court, Broomfield, Somersetshire, England. The ancestral home of his family was
Fyne Court, whose ancestors in the 17th century were granted a coat of arms.
Crosse was a child prodigy who mastered ancient Greek by the age of eight. He
attended Dr. Seyer’s School in Bristol in 1793, where he had an immense
interest in natural science and the developing study of electricity. His father
was a friend of both the scientists Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and Benjamin
Franklin (1706–1790). Crosse continued his education in 1802 at Brasenose
College, Oxford, as a gentlemen commoner, but he was not happy at Brase­nose.
He found many of the students simple minded and unrestrained and the tutors
inadequate.

The death of his mother in 1805 left him an orphan. By that time his
father, sister, uncle, and two of his best friends had already passed on.
Crosse retired to a lonesome life at Fyne Court, where he continued to study
mineralogy, electricity, and chemistry. He became friendly with George Singer,
who was anthologizing his book Elements of Electricity and ElectroChemistry,
published in 1814.

Crystal Formation

Beginning in 1807, Crosse experimented in the formation of crystals
through the action of electrical currents. The incentive
for this type of research was the study of the formation of stalagmites and
stalactites in Holywell Cavern at Broomfield. Crosse took some water from
Holywell Cavern and linked it to the poles of a voltaic battery. Crosse
observed the formation of crystals after ten days. This experiment was a
predecessor of an amplification 30 years later when Crosse claimed to have
observed the production of insect life through electrocrystallization.

In 1809, Crosse married Mary Anne Hamilton, and within ten years they
had seven children, three of whom died in childbirth. Crosse’s friend Singer
also passed away in 1817, only three years after his book on electricity was
published. Crosse became more and more secluded from the world and devoted
himself to his scientific research.

Sinister Reputation

The neighbors of Andrew Crosse considered him more devil than man. They did not understand the bright flashes in his laboratory windows
at night when he was working with his unrefined electrical equipment. He
constructed a mile and a quarter of copper wires on poles at Fyne Court,
connected to his “electrical room,” where he experimented on the nature and amount
of electricity in the atmosphere. Not only was he greatly feared and avoided by
the local residents as “the thunder and lighting man” and “the Wizard of the
Quantocks” (the nearby Quantock Hills), but he was also condemned openly
as an atheist, a blasphemer, and a mad scientist who would best be put in
chains for the common safety of the community.

Andrew Crosse was a passionate amateur experimenter in the new field of
electricity. He did not communicate with others in the same field, so he worked
with two things against him. First, he did not exactly understand what he was
doing himself, and second, he did not know what had already been done in the
field of electricity.

As Frank Edwards wrote in Stranger Than Science, “Yet it may have
been this very lack of knowledge which led him to undertake the experiments
which were to inscribe his name, however faintly, in the annals of science.”

In 1814, when Crosse was 30, he presented a lecture on his experiments,
and there is a strong possibility that it was attended by the poet Shelley and
by his future wife Mary. If this is true, then it may have inspired Mary to
write her famous novel Frankenstein in 1816, and there would be some
vindication for portraying Crosse, as one modern biographer has written, as “the
man who was Frankenstein.”

It would be 21 years after Mary Shelley had written Frankenstein
that Crosse did those experiments that were to make his name infamous
everywhere in Europe, and which as a result Crosse was entered in the Dictionary
of National Biography. He was trying nothing more aspiring than to create
crystals of silica. Thirty years earlier, he had sent an electric current
through water that came from a cavern filled to utmost capacity with
stalactites and stalagmites, and been overjoyed when crystals of calcium
carbonate (of which stalagmites are produced) formed on one of the electrodes.

Little Bugs

In 1837 he desired to make crystals of natural glass. Colin and Damon Wilson wrote in The Encyclopedia of Unsolved
Mysteries, “So he made glass out of ground flint and potassium carbonate,
and dissolved it in hydrochloric acid. His idea was then to allow this fluid to
drip, little by little, through a lump of porous stone which had been
electrified by a battery, and to see whether it formed crystals. It did not.

However, after two weeks, he observed that something odd was happening
to the lump of red-colored stone (it was, in fact, a piece of iron oxide from
the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, chosen merely because it was porous). Little
white nipples began to stick out of it. Then the ‘nipples’ began to grow tiny
hairs, or filaments. They looked oddly like tiny insects, but Crosse knew this
was impossible. On the 28th day, he went into his laboratory and examined the
rock through a magnifying glass, and was staggered to see that the filaments
were moving around. And after a few more days there could be no possible doubt.
The tiny creatures were walking around. Under a microscope, he could see that
they were little bugs, and that the small ones had six legs and the larger ones
had eight.

All of this was very bizarre. Crosse thought perhaps insect eggs had
contaminated his controlled experiment, so he decided to give it another try.
This time he carefully controlled the influence of outside conditions.

In this experiment, Crosse used airtight containers. Before the
experiment began, all the material was completely sterilized using hot alcohol.
The electrical wire passed into the sealed container through a glass stopper.
The glass was constructed at a temperature that would melt iron, and distilled
water was used to mix the ingredients, consisting of copper nitrate, copper
sulfate, and iron sulfate. At last, the battery was connected and the slow
dripping process started. Within a few months, Crosse once again observed
insect-like creatures crawling about inside the regulated environment. Crosse
was absolutely sure that he had indeed created life. He was overjoyed with his
discovery and considered the possibility that he had created life from
inorganic matter.

Experiment Described

In 1837, the same year, Crosse wrote a paper for the
London Electrical Society about his experiment as he perceived it.

Frank Edwards wrote in Stranger Than Science, “He wrote ‘On the
fourteenth day after the commencement of this experiment, I observed through a
small magnifying lens a few small whitish specks clustered around the middle of
the electrified stone. Four days later these specks had doubled in size and had
struck out six or eight fine filaments around each speck…the filaments longer
than the hemisphere from which they projected.

“‘On the 26th day of the experiment, the objects assumed the form of
perfect insects, standing erect on the bristles which were growing. Although I
regarded this as most unusual I attached no singular significance to it until
two days later, the 28th day of the experiment when the magnifying lens showed
that these things were moving their legs. I must say now that I was quite
astonished. After a few more days they detached themselves from the stone and
moved about through the caustic solution.

“‘In the course of a few weeks more than a hundred of them made their
appearance on the oxide iron. Under a microscope I examined them and found that
the smaller ones had six legs, the larger ones had eight. Others who have
examined them pronounced them to be the genus Acari, but some say they are an
entirely new species.

“‘I have never ventured an opinion on the cause of their birth for the
reason that I have never been able to form one. I thought they might have been
airborne creatures that had drifted into the liquid and prospered, but later
experiments with closed vessels, in which the ingredients had been purified in
the oven, produced identical creatures; therefore, I suggest that they must
originate in the electrified liquid by some process unknown to me.’”

Additional experiments showed that the minute organisms were able to
reproduce themselves, but none of them survived beyond the first autumn frost.
Entomologists to whom he showed the tiny entities identified them unwaveringly
as ticks or mites, of the order Acari; it was even suggested to label the new
species Acari crossii.

The Experiment Duplicated

Crosse wrote a report of his experiment and sent it to the London
Electrical Society. An electrician named W. H. Weeks, who lived at
Sandwich in Kent, was chosen to repeat Crosse’s experiment. Weeks did so and
published his results in Annals of Electricity and in the Transactions of the
society. Weeks had also observed the mites. Other engineers performed Crosse’s
experiments and also acquired the mites.

Crosse talked of his experiments and results to a local newspaper
editor, who published a friendly article in the Western Gazette. Almost
immediately, Crosse’s name was known everywhere in Europe.

Crosse made a fascinating observation that most people perceived him as
a magician of some sort. He was even blamed for a potato blight that ravaged
the West Country that year. Clergymen declared Crosse a blasphemer and an
atheist, a “reviler of our holy religion,” who had boldly set himself as a
rival to God in whom he did not believe. People everywhere in Europe were
shocked at Crosse’s blasphemous atrocity. Doing his best to defend himself,
Crosse stated that he was a “humble and lowly reverencer of that Great Being,”
and further stated that his discovery had been made by pure chance. Everything
Crosse said to defend himself made no difference to scientists and the general
public. People shut their doors in his face. Merchants refused to do business
with him. Angry locals destroyed his fences.

Andrew Crosse understood he was walking on thin ice before the most
respected scientists of his day. He was explaining an event that was completely
foreign to their orthodox knowledge, and because of that he was inviting
mockery. And the mockery came quickly. Charges of hoax and fraud overwhelmed
him. He and his so-called insects were condemned openly as nothing more than a
deception.

Later researchers, such as Alfred Smee and Henry Noad, were unable to
duplicate Crosse’s results.

Amid all the controversy that his notice had created, Crosse stood
helpless and alone. Even other scientists who had the same results with his
experiments remained silent.

Many newspapers in February 1837 reported that Michael Faraday had duplicated
Crosse’s results, but this was not true. Other writers have stated that Faraday
claimed himself that he was able to duplicate the experiment and create the
strange, tiny creatures. But Faraday never even performed the experiments.
Other writers also state that in 1837 Crosse was defended by Faraday at the
Royal Institution. But all this failed to silence the critics. By now Crosse
came to believe that it was now almost impossible to make the general public
knowledgeable of what he had really said and done, so he came to the conclusion
that the best course of action was to simply withdraw in honorable silence.

Grim Years

The next ten years for Crosse were grim. His wife
and brother were sick and both passed away in 1846. His neighbors avoided him
and he was without company. He was troubled by financial problems. According to
Crosse, it was not because of overspending on scientific equipment, but not
keeping an eye on household expenditure which he claimed caused him to be
cheated. In 1849, Crosse wrote a letter to author Harriet Martineau who wanted
to write about his experiments, and he wrote sadly about himself as “surrounded
by death and disease.”

However in 1849, when he was 65, he went to a dinner and to his surprise
sat next to a dark-haired, pretty girl in her 20s who was captivated by science
and by Crosse himself. The pretty girl’s name was Cornelia Burns and she became
Crosse’s second wife. Crosse’s last six years of life were fairly joyful. He
had friends visit him at Fyne Court and went to visit Faraday in London.

But all was not well with Crosse. One day he explained to his wife that
he believed that this world was hell, and that people are sent here because of
sins done is a previous existence. (In Bernard Shaw’s play, John Bull’s
Other Island, 1904, Father Keegan makes a similar statement.) At the time
of Crosse’s statement, there was an intense, sudden burst of electricity in the
room. This was not a sign from God scolding him for his insufficient faith, but
because snow falling had caused a short circuit in some of his electrical
equipment. In 1855, at the age of 71, Crosse suffered a stroke and passed away.

Extraterrestrial Insects?

The enigma of the Acari remains to this day and no answer can explain
all the facts. Valentine Dyall in Unsolved Mysteries has
put forward the theory that the insects may have traveled to Earth in a
meteorite, a view that in modern times might have a certain amount of favor in
the theories of Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle, who claim that life may
have arrived on Earth by a meteorite. This theory perhaps could explain how the
chunk of iron oxide contained eggs but could not account for how the eggs got
into the other experiments. Comdr. Rupert Gould, the author of Oddities,
writes about Dr. A. C. Oudemans, the authority on Acari, who said that he was
satisfied by the evidence that Crosse’s bugs were the common Glycophagus
domesticus, which are able to get into hermetically sealed tins. But why would
these tiny creatures crawl into iron sulfate, copper nitrate, and everything
else?

One of the great mysteries of science is why experiments work for some
people and not for others.

Colin and Damon Wilson wrote in The Encyclopedia of Unsolved
Mysteries, “In my biography of Wilhelm Reich I have described how Reich
placed dry sterile hay in distilled water, and how after a day or two it was
full of tiny living organisms, some even visible to the naked eye.”

Reich became convinced that he had found the basic units of life, and
called them “bions.”

“Reich finally concluded,” write the Wilsons, “that his bions were not
living cells but an intermediate form of life between dead and living matter. I
have gone on to cite Jung’s theory of synchronicity, and of ‘exteriorization
phenomena’. We know that coincidences far outside the laws of probability are
everyday occurrences. Jung thought that, particularly in people of high
vitality, the unconscious mind can in some unknown way engineer coincidences.
‘Exteriorization phenomena’ are phenomena caused by these unknown powers of the
unconscious—in one famous story, Jung and Freud were having a heated argument
about the supernatural when Jung experienced a strong feeling of heat in his
diaphragm, and there was a loud explosion from the bookcase. Jung said that
this was an example of ‘Exteriorization phenomena’ and Freud replied ‘Bosh.’
‘It is not bosh’, replied Jung, ‘as you will realize in a moment when there is
another explosion.’ And at that moment another explosion occurred. Jung
believed that so-called Flying Saucers were a kind of exteriorization
phenomena, or ‘projections’ of the unconscious. It seems possible that Reich’s
bions—and his sightings of Flying Saucers—may have been in some way dependent
upon his abnormally active unconscious mind.”

Mystical Experience

The Wilsons wrote, “He also had at least one semi-mystical experience. He was on his way back home from Plymouth, and stopped overnight in
Exeter, feeling tired and very low. Then, according to his second wife’s
account ‘he had scarcely laid upon his head, when a sudden train of thought
burst upon him with such intensity, that it seemed almost like inspiration; he
was not asleep, it was no dream; but yet in imagination he roamed over the
universe; and beheld with the eye of fancy the unbounded glories of creation; it
appeared to him, he said, as if the soul had quitted its prison of clay, and
was free to reach the limits of space, or rather, to annihilate space with the
intensity of its perception. Centuries of time were condensed into those
moments of ecstatic life, and Nature’s laws seemed clear to the omniscience of
its glance; a sense of blessedness sustained him—he felt immortal.”

But this particular Jungian theory fails as the two other theories fail.
If the Acari were created by an unusual active unconscious mind, then why were
other scientists able to produce the Acari? Reich would probably reply that the
other scientists could produce the Acari because Crosse had discovered the
secret of producing bions, which have an electrical charge and are drawn to the
cathode or anode, and that the bions actually turned into elementary life
forms.

Crosse never wrote or said that he had discovered anything. All he was
doing was reporting what happened in his experiments. After the attacks upon
him diminished, he retired to his home in the Quantock Hills for many more
years among his batteries and his test tubes.

Scientists to this day are puzzled as to what Crosse discovered. Some
scientists believe the Acari were Glyophagus Domesticus, an insect which seems
to remain alive in any conditions. Others maintain that Crosse merely created
chemical constituents which took the appearance of something living. Critics
contend that some sort of contamination had occurred and the tiny creatures
must have been some sort of common insect.

As is often the case, time has obscured the precise procedure needed to
perform this experiment successfully. Therefore we may never know how and why
the tiny creatures were created or if they ever were created. However, could it
have been conceivable that Crosse by chance discovered the primordial soup that
evolutionists theorize was needed to created the world’s first life form?

Still Unexplained

Even today scientists cannot explain away the Acari that were perhaps
created by Crosse. It is interesting that no scientist is even
willing to reproduce the intriguing 19th-century experiment.

Crosse lived his long life as a meek researcher after scientific truths.
The phenomenon for which he is remembered is the controversy about his Acari,
uninvited then, a mystery to this day.

The
Andrew Crosse Experiments

Did a 19th
century scientist actually discover a chemical that could produce living,
breathing creatures?
Is it possible to produce life from inorganic matter? This man, Andrew Crosse,
sure seems to have done it. Some experiments on electrocrystallisation yielded
really amazing results. Whatever concepts you may have of life, prepare to be
stunned!

Andrew
Crosse: The Man

Born on 17th
July 1784, British scientist Andrew Crosse is highly regarded for his
experiments with electrocrystallization. Having driven inspiration from a renowned
cave of natural crystals that he had once visited, Crosse set up a little
laboratory in his private manor house. He experimented day and night, and soon
produced 200 new varieties of crystals never beheld by man before (talk about
devotion!). Despite his tireless efforts, Crosse was shunned from society as a
“thunder and lightning man”, an atheist and a blasphemer. A detached amateur
scientist, Crosse limited his experiments to the four walls of his little lab,
never joining any institution, or organization. Neighbors avoided him, the
society neglected him, but not for long…

The
Experiments

Andrew’s
fate was to turn completely in 1837, when he began another of his
electrocrystallization experiments. This time, his target was to create “glass
crystals”. Accordingly, he created a fluid by taking a glass made of ground
flint and potassium chloride, and then dissolving it in hydrochloric acid. He
then allowed the fluid to dry through a porous stone which had been electrified
via a battery. Although no glass crystals were formed, the results of the
experiment continue to baffle the world even today.

The
Results

In a letter
to the London Electrical Society shortly after these experiments, Crosse detailed the
outcomes:

On the
fourteenth day after the commencement of this experiment, I observed through a
small magnifying lens a few small whitish specks clustered around the middle of
the electrified stone. Four days later, these specks had doubled in size and
had struck out six or eight fine filaments around each speck . . . the
filaments longer than the hemisphere from which they projected.On the 26th day
of the experiment, the objects assumed the form of perfect insects, standing
erect on the bristles which they were growing. Although I regarded this as most
unusual I attached no singular significance to it until two days later, the
28th day of the experiment, when the magnifying lens showed that these things
were moving their legs. I must say now that I was quite astonished.

After a few
more days they detached themselves from the stone and moved about through the
caustic acid solution.In the course of a few weeks more than a hundred of them
made their appearance on the oxide of iron. Under a microscope I examined them
and found that the smaller ones had six legs, the larger ones had eight. Others
who have examined them pronounced them to be of the Genus Acari, but some say
they are an entirely new species.I have never ventured an opinion on the cause
of their birth for the reason that I have never been able to form one. I
thought they might have been airborne creatures that had drifted into the
liquid and prospered, but later experiments with closed vessels, in which the ingredients
had been purified by baking in the oven, produced identical creatures;
therefore, I suggest that they must originate in the electrified liquid by some
process unknown to me.

The
Aftermath

A mere mortal had dared challenge the laws of
creation by forming life! This was not to be endured! The Church accused
Crosse of blasphemy, while faith-holders hated him, merchants and neighbors
boycotted him and a group of clergy actually gathered before his house to
exorcise him! Andrew Crosse tried to reason that he was humbly reporting what
he had noticed, but to no avail. Other scientists cried fraud. Many tried to
duplicate his experiments, some succeeded, some failed, but most of those who
succeeded kept their mouths shut in fear. But there was this one voice that
would not keep quiet.

Michael
Faraday’s Intervention

Defending
Crosse before the Royal Institution, Faraday said that he was able to duplicate
his experiments with the same effect, although he wasn’t sure whether the insects
had been created in solution or just brought back to life by the electricity.
Eventually, the public frenzy died out and Crosse was able to return to normal
life in his residence at Quantock Hills, devoting all his interest to science,
till he died in 1855.

Those who
repeated Crosse’s experiments and were successful were able to cultivate little
mite-like insects of the Acari family, but of an entirely new species, which
has since been dubbed Acari Crossii. With time, the exact procedure of the
experiments have faded into oblivion, and today, the mystery of the Crosse
Experiments is just as much unexplained as they were centuries before.

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2 comments:

This scientist was actually more of an alchemist & biologist that had a passion for genetics more than just that of a scientist. I have been studying Master Craftsman Andrew Crosse's work for well over a decade. Andrew was on the path to create the crown jewel of alchemy & genetics, which actually is not via popular modern belief the Philosopher's Stones or just Stones for short, as there are actually many ;) The crown jewel of alchemy is the path of Homunculi. I'm surprised it actually shows up on wiki. The explanation on there of course is purposeful misinformation except for the size explanation. They make it sound like it's a fantasy like process to create midgets from like that of the Wizard of Oz. Fact is we really are all in "Oz" & we are all really ruled by quite the collection of wicked witches. It is too bad the wicked ones have more control. Homunculi is the path to create living & breathing creatures from inorganic matter is actually how we where all created. By size comparison, we would be classified as the small beings versus the physical size of the creators. Yes folks, there was more than one "creator" on our job. It is really wild stuff. Thanks for posting this NexusIllumiati!!

You're welcome Merkaba. By Cross' day such distinctions were still being formulated and the malificent ones worked mainly through the cathoholics in the West. The fact that we are all homonculi is a particularly difficult concept to take on board for most - even more difficult for some postmodern minds than for their ancestors.

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